It has become common for autonomous machines to move through public and restricted spaces to accomplish tasks. Since these spaces are often shared with people, the safety of these movements is paramount. However, safety concerns can often result in slow moving machines which is undesirable for several reasons including prolonged occupation of shared space and lengthened task accomplishment times. For example, safety standards can require that motion controllers of mobile machines assume worst case values for various characteristics of the mobile machines, resulting in excessively slow motion.
The problem can be exacerbated in situations where characteristics of the mobile machines change regularly, even frequently. For example, consider the case of a mobile machine that transports a payload. Even when the characteristics of the mobile machine are relatively static, the characteristics of the payload (e.g., the characteristics related to Newtonian mechanics) can change regularly. In some situations, the payload may be an item holder, with a variety of item types being added to and removed from the payload at frequent intervals. The requirement to make worst case assumptions for mobile machines with changing characteristics means that conventional motion control systems and methods can become excessively slow, prohibitively costly, inefficient (e.g., with respect to time), and/or even ineffective for some tasks.